Are you an educator fascinated with creating videos that feature great content, are available on popular media sites (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo), and feature YOU as the chief learning strategist and interpreter? What’s more, new tools make it easy to annotate videos. Annotating videos involves layering text, links, and comment bubbles into an existing video.

EdPuzzle makes it straightforward to add notes and assessments to videos from YouTube, Khan Academy, Learn Zillion and others. This enables understanding checks. There’s also an iOS app you and/or your students can use.

VideoAnt, a web-based video annotation tool, also allows for annotations or comments to web-hosted videos.

This online annotation tool, Swivl’s Recap, is a student response and reflection app. Teachers can prompt students to respond to questions and students respond in video via their mobile device of choice. Watch this overview of Recap via TeacherCast.

Flipgrid works a little differently from the tools above, empowering you to create video-based discussion groups. The teacher posts videos and students respond to those. The “video group” can be passworded via a pin code, and then made accessible online via a web site.

3 Student VideoNotes ToolsLooking for tools that allow your students to take notes about videos? Check out this blog entry by Richard Byrne. In it, he highlights these tools: